I am using Windows (I don't know how to do it... I don't have linux, so I can't do it myself) and I need help, to convert this file (Alcatel) - http://sourceforge.net/projects/alcatel/files/OT_5020D_20130606.tar.xz/download into a flashable image. If anyone can help me, or can compile it, I will be glad.
P.S. This is the content of that ZIP file - http://i.imgur.com/H9Qmbdx.png (my PHONE'S system files are lost, and can't do anything, just frozen on startup ALCATEL message screen. ALCATEL support told me to compile the flashable image from the link I provided above.)
If the only problem is that you cannot install Linux as your main operating system, put the Linux into virtual machine and do the work there.
You can use some free virtual machine like Oracle Virtual Box, for instance that only takes minutes to set up. You will get the internal IP address, visible from your workstation only, that is enough for your task. You can use usual SSH and SFTP to communicate with it and the virtual machine itself will provide shell access for the initial setup. If necessary, it is also possible to configure such a virtual machine to connect the outside Internet.
As said from my comment, you can try flashing the custom recovery on to the phone first http://theunlockr.com/2013/12/23/flash-custom-recovery-alcatel-one-touch-mpop-ot-5020x/
With the custom recovery, you can try to flash the zip file that you extracted from the .tar.xz file. If you are unable to flash the zip file, I suggest you to download a CyanogenMod zip file from here http://forum.xda-developers.com/general/general/rom-mod-alcatel-5020-t3060346/post59584683#post59584683 and see what is inside. And then you tailor your zip file's structure accordingly.
Btw, your zip file is not a kernel. From the size, I believe it should be the entire ROM. Kernel should be less than 10MB AFAIK.
Your file above is likely your android operating system, not your kernel. I recently flash a new kernel to my Samsung Galaxy Centura, it was less than 20mb. I don't know what you did to your phone, but you may not need to do anything with the kernel. You said your system files were missing, so if you could get someone to convert you file to a flashable zip then you could probably fix your phone.
What you essentially need is a ROM image for your phone model. I guess building it from sources is the hardest way to get it, and probably will take a lot of time for you to figure out how to do it properly(like weeks,and there is big chance to kill your phone for good by flashing bad ROM). So I suggest to find already compiled ROM for your phone with stock or some custom firmware (I suggest to check if there is CyanogenMod port for your phone) and flash this.
Related
So as the titles suggests, I have a device whos bootloader is unlocked and adb has root access. Running android 7.0.
Custom recovery isnt an option as there is no TWRP for this android device so I am looking to both root the OS as well as flashing gapps and cant figure it out.
Does anyone have any suggestons on how I can install and update su and install gapps over adb shell?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You did not say what device you're using, but the following approach should be universal to all devices. Note that i do not take responsibility of what you do with your phone. Flashing wrong images can result in soft- or hard-bricks, so take care. But on the other hand, this method is rather popular and works for a lot of people, so i would suggest to try it out.
First of all, there were files which were called cf-auto-root files. With them you can easily root your phone.
Since the cf-auto-root provider has beeen superseded by firmware.mobi this method has become even easier. So if you visit https://desktop.firmware.mobi/, you can select your device, select the proper firmware and then configure a package which contains the firmware and the auto-root file. Now just donwload this file.
I could explain how you have to go on from this point, but the .zip archive contains literally everything you need. Just follow the steps inside the README.txt.
Once you got your phone rooted, there are several approaches to flash things like gapps without the need of a custom recovery. Just google for apps with such options, e.g. "Flashify" or "FlashFire". Just take the app which fits your needs best.
If you actually don't know where you can get flashable gapps archives, visit http://opengapps.org/.
Last tip: If you got your phone bricked, just try to flash your firmware agian via ODIN (without auto-root i would suggest), to restore everything to "default".
I've been trying to write a small program to copy a folder on my mac (10.10.3), containing a set of songs, into the music folder on my Galaxy S3 (GS3) when it is connected via USB. Clearly I could just use Android File Transfer (AFT), and copy the files in (manually), however this wouldn't teach me anything. My goal is thus to automate this act. Python seems like a good choice for this project, as it seems like mostly scripting (in fact a Bash script may suffice).
This should be simple, using a bash script like cp ~/../music_on_mac /.../music_target_on_android
However, the file structure of the GS3 doesn't show up in the finder (like you would expect from an ordinary USB drive). I can only see the file structure via Android File Transfer. From what I've read, this is expected behavior (I suppose due to formatting differences?). Thus I've been unable to find the target directory /.../music_target_on_android
My best guess (getting a bit out of my depth here), is that I need to copy the music folder, and then pipe it to AFT, and have AFT place it in/on top of the target Music folder on my GS3. Is this correct? If so, could anyone offer suggestions on implementing this? If not, alternative approaches or suggestions would also be appreciated.
I'd also note that I considered using ./adb push <local> <remote> to try to copy the files directly, however this pushed back that the device was read only. I'm also not familiar enough to find the proper directory on the GS3 (the one containing the target for the "Music" folder) using ./adb shell. There's also the added downside that in order to use a solution involving the ADT, one must have the ADT (which most people don't). Moreover, I want to keep it simple.
Research Update:
I've found that my phone will not show up in Finder because Google has disabled USB mass storage (aka mounting the phone as a disk) in favor of the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). AFT is just an MTP client, needed because unlike Windows and Linux, OSX does not support MTP.
http://www.howtogeek.com/192732/android-usb-connections-explained-mtp-ptp-and-usb-mass-storage/
Based on tips, I've been able to implement an alternative based on creating an FTP server on my phone. Connecting to this gives me file system access and write privileges from my terminal, which is half the battle, however its quite slow. Thus I'd still like to find a way to automate instructions to Android File Transfer.
We have to set up a number of android devices for a project we are working on... What we have to do is actually edit the iptables of the device. Rather then doing each one by one I'm curious if there is a way to set up one device then clone the image so that we have an exact replica of that image?
We would then perhaps use PhonixCard to reinstall that image on all of the other devices...
Not sure it matters much but the device is running 4.0.1... all of the devices that we want to replicate the image on are exactly the same device.
from a previous SO answer:
Make a nandroid backup from recovery.
Make sure that the backup is located on the sdcard.
Mount the sdcard on a computer and copy it's contents to a folder on a pc.
Copy the entire contents of the folder you made above to the target device.
Root the device than install a custom recovery if you didn't do this already.
In recovery restore the nandroid backup.
Reboot the device. Now everything should be exactly the same as on the original.
Repeat steps 4-7 for every device.
If there're lots of small files that need to be transferred, another possibility is zip them up copy to the phone and than unzip it using
adb shell unzip path/to/file.zip
Once the command is launched you can disconnect the device the process will continue as long as there're no conflicting files or folders.
So answer cloning android OS images
I am looking for a generic way to mount windows shares via the USB cable (not WiFi). By generic, I mean a method that does not require device specific kernel modules.
If this is not achievable, I am open to other ideas but WiFi/internet connectivity is totally out of the question.
My development machine is sitting on a domain and the shares are likely to be on another machine, not necessarily local on my host machine.
Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly welcomed.
Many thanks,
P
This is not possible without kernel modules, because kernel modules are the thing that does the whole job. So your question is like "i am looking for the way to put that water into the glass, but without the glass part". So apps may offer SMB support, but that's because these apps include all the code to handle SMB inside. So if you want to mount samba share on filesystem level you need kernel module and sufficient permissions. Otherwise you just need to look for app that supports SMB and does what you want.
I'm definetly considering to use a chroot of some linux installation to implement a smb arm linux server on android, you can run all sorts of ARM linux tools inside an android machine trough chroot, once in linux there's not much you can't do, and the simplest distro available can pretty much install whatever you want. Of course, you can strip just the server binaries inside a package and run that just like an android app of some sort, or install the binaries in /system/bin and xbin in android and add some init script. Whatever rocks your boat.
BTW, my implementation involves a USB-ramdrive, i want my 2GB RAM MK809II android device to store a 1GB img file in a tmpfs ramdisk, mounted in a place accessible by all apps like /sdcard/ram/ram.img, where i can create a smb share to a windows machine, that connection will be made via USB, i'll use adb reverse to connect to the SMB share and redirect the server ports to my local tcp 7777 1137 1138 1139, my smb filesharing server has already been disabled, so these relevant ports are free to use in my pc, that's important because windows will only recognize servers running in the same ports. I'll access the smb share from windows and mount the img file in the share trough ImDisk to have my virtual
ramdrive under windows.
I have a pc with only 1.5gb of ram, and sometimes this thing run out of memory, i want to have a readyboost drive that's lightning fast compared to a solid state usb drive, i want to have usb as a bottleneck in my transfer speed..... some time ago i saw a 50MB/s usb2.0 hdd then i wondered what would happen if i can bottleneck the fck out of usb2.0, that's completely inviable via it's original solid state bottlenecked drives, but ram in the other hand has almost no speed limit... so i got my little project, out of some need and mostly curiosity. I'm chasing for a way into store the pagefile in that ramdisk, though i think windows readyboost already stores virtual memory pages in the readyboost
file.
What is meant by System.img in Android? What is the purpose of using it?
It's the Android file system, which means all the support files that Android needs, the applications, but also the framework, the Dalvik VM, initialization scripts and so on.
Another part of the file system would be the userdata.img which is mostly empty when you compile the framework.
It is not the OS, that would be either a plain zImage or boot.img (and recovery.img for to boot in recovery mode).
This is the actual system image. It's the OS ... kind of. Look here at point four.
EDIT: To be more precise the system image along with the kernel image are the forming the OS. The system image alone is one part of the OS.